CHARLES FORT died in 1932, fifteen years before the flying-saucer craze began. It is a pity he did not live to witness this mass mania, because in many ways, it was a triumph of pure Forteanism. Mysterious objects are seen in the sky. They elude all “official” and “scientific” explanation. Wild Fortean hypotheses are invented to explain them, and discussed seriously by the man in the street as well as by seemingly intelligent authors and editors. As we shall see later, Fort himself collected hundreds of press clippings about mysterious lights and objects in the sky, and speculated at length on their extraterrestrial origin. But first, let us chronicle briefly the major events in the history of the fiying-saucer delusion.
It all began on Tuesday, June 24, 1947. Kenneth Arnold, owner of a fire control supply company in Boise, Idaho, was flying his private plane above the Cascade Mountains of Washington. Arnold is a handsome, athletic chap (former North Dakota all-state football end) in his middle thirties, who uses his plane for distributing his fire-fighting equipment. As he neared Mt. Rainier, nine circular objects, in diagonal chain formation and moving at high speed, passed within twenty-five miles of his plane. He estimated their size as slightly smaller than a DC-4 which also happened to be in the sky. They flew, he later wrote, “as if they were linked together,” swerving in and out of the high mountain peaks with “flipping, erratic movements.”
At Pendleton, Oregon, Arnold told a reporter that the objects “flew like a saucer would if you skipped it across the water.” Next day, the wire services blanketed the nation with the story, using the word “saucer” to describe the objects. Actually, Arnold’s original statement did not say the objects were saucer-shaped. But the word caught on, and the mania was underway. Newspapers all over the country were swamped with phone calls from excited people who had seen “saucers” over their farms, towns, and cities. Most of these stories were printed and put on the wires with little or no checking. If the observer did not use the word “saucer,” the local paper or press-service stringer put it in, and if the wire story failed to mention “saucer,” papers receiving it were likely to use the word in their headlines. In a few weeks, saucers had been reported from every state in the union, as well as Canada, Australia, England, and Iran.
Occasionally, sky objects of other shapes broke into the news. There were balls of fire, ice cream cones, flying hub-caps, doughnuts, and one wingless, cigar-shaped craft with rows of lighted windows, long orange-red exhaust, and blue flames dancing along the underbelly. David Lawrence, in his U.S. News, disclosed that the saucers were secret U.S. aircraft, “a combination of helicopter and a fast jet plane.” Walter Winchell had inside information that the strange platters were from Russia. Andrei Gromyko, in a rare burst of confidence, revealed that possibly the saucers were coming from a Soviet discus thrower who didn’t know his own strength.
Three military men lost their lives investigating the saucers. The first tragedy occurred shortly after the original sighting. A report reached Arnold that a weird doughnut-shaped craft had spewed forth large quantities of lava-like rock on Maury Island, a few miles off the coast near Tacoma, Washington. Arnold flew to Tacoma to investigate. On the way, incidentally, he spotted another cluster of about twenty-five small (two or three feet across), amber-colored saucers.
The entire Maury Island episode later proved to be a hoax elaborately planned by two Tacoma men who hoped to sell the phony yarn to an adventure magazine. Both men eventually made a full confession. Arnold, however, was completely taken in by the hoax, and his phone call to Air Force Intelligence, at Hamilton Field, California, brought two officers to the scene. On their way back, the left engine of the B-25 bomber they were flying burst into flames. Two enlisted men also in the plane parachuted to safety after being ordered to jump. Eleven minutes later the plane crashed and both officers were killed.
According to Arnold’s several thud-and-blunder accounts of all this, the plane was carrying a corn-flakes box filled with samples of the mysterious lava. No trace of the box was reported found in the wreckage. “Were both of these men dead long before their plane actually crashed and is that the reason their plane was under little or no control?” Arnold asks. In all his writings about the saucers he betrays this suspicion of mysterious forces and conspiracies thwarting his efforts to get at the real truth.
The second tragedy was perhaps the most dramatic event in the history of the saucer mania. It occurred in January, 1948, at the Air Force base near Fort Knox, Kentucky. A round, white object spotted in the sky was chased by Captain Thomas F. Mantell, Jr., in a P-51 fighter plane. The object rose rapidly. Mantell followed it to 18,000 feet, then radioed to the ground, “Going to 20,000 feet. If no closer, will abandon chase.” That was the last message from him. Apparently he blacked out in the high altitude, and after reaching about 30,000 feet the plane went into a fatal dive.
At first the military forces brushed aside the flying-saucer mania as mass delusion, but after the reports grew to vast proportions, the Air Force set up a “Project Saucer” to make a careful investigation. After fifteen months they reported they had found no evidence which could not be explained as hoaxes, illusions, or misinterpretations of balloons and other familiar sky objects. Later, President Truman also issued an official denial that the military were working on any type of airborne craft which corresponded to saucer descriptions.
In February, 1951, the Office of Naval Research distributed a ten-page report on the Navy’s huge skyhook balloons, used for cosmic-ray research. The report pointed out in detail the ease with which these giant plastic bags—a hundred feet in diameter—could be mistaken for flying disks. The balloons reach a height of 100,000 feet, and are often borne by jetstream winds at speeds of more than 200 miles per hour. If the observer guesses the balloon to be farther away than it is, then, of course, estimates of speed can be incredibly high.
At a distance, a balloon loses entirely its three-dimensional spherical aspect. It takes on the appearance of a disk. From beneath, instruments hanging below the balloon’s center, can easily be mistaken for a “hole,” giving the disk the shape of a doughnut. If viewed from the side, the disk seems to be flying on edge, like a rolling wheel.
Through a telescope or binoculars, the flatness of a balloon is greatly magnified because of a curious optical illusion. A telescope does not present an image of the object as it would appear if you were closer to it. Instead, it takes the image, exactly as it appears in the distance, and enlarges it for the eye. You seem to be closer to it, but the perspective it would normally have if you were that close is not present at all. As a result, a globular object viewed through a telescope looks remarkably like a plate. If you have ever looked through binoculars at cars coming toward you on a long highway, you may recall how odd and flat the cars appear.
In addition, the plastic composition of a skyhook balloon offers a surface that seems highly metallic in reflected sunlight. Most of the saucer reports describe the disks as silvery in color. At sunset the balloons may shine in the sky for thirty minutes after the earth has become dark. “If your imagination soars,” the Navy release said, “the light reflection from one side may impress you as the glow of an atomic engine. The wisp of the balloon’s instrument-filled tail may impress you as the exhaust. The sun’s rays may suffuse the plastic bag to a fiery glow.”
The first skyhooks were sent up in 1947, the year flying saucers were first reported. Arnold’s original description of what he saw above the Cascade Mountains tallies remarkably well with what he would be expected to see had he flown near a group of smaller plastic balloons often used in place of the single large one. He estimated their size as smaller than a plane and the distance as about twenty-five miles—or twice the length of Manhattan Island. At this distance they would have been mere specks in the sky, and since Arnold was seeing them with unaided eyes, we cannot trust his guesses as to their actual size, shape, distance, or speed. Estimates of speed presuppose accurate knowledge of distance, and this in turn cannot be gauged unless the exact size is known.
Similarly, all the details of Captain Mantell’s unfortunate death suggest he was chasing a skyhook. Moreover, it is known that such a balloon was in the area on the day he made his fatal climb. Even the descriptions of several hundred small “saucers” which sailed over Farmington, New Mexico, on March 17, 1950, read like descriptions of balloons—though of course they could not have been skyhooks. They were white and round. They “fluttered.” They seemed to “play tag” with each other in the sky.
One of the few points on which all observers of flying saucers agree is that there is no noise. This excludes, of course, any known type of propulsion, but is precisely the way a balloon behaves. Observers have sometimes insisted that what they saw could not be a balloon because it was moving against the wind. They forget that wind directions in the stratosphere may be quite different from wind directions on the ground. At the time of the Navy’s report, 270 skyhooks had been released from various spots in the United States, often remaining in the sky more than thirty hours. Frequently, lost balloons were actually traced by following press reports of flying saucer sightings!
After the Navy’s release on skyhooks, reports of flying saucers decreased markedly, and green fireballs, streaking across southwestern skies, caught the public fancy. In the spring and summer of 1952, however, there was a new wave of saucer sightings, as well as a dramatic saucer scare in the nation’s capital when mysterious blips of light kept appearing and vanishing on radar screens.
Many factors seem to be involved in the saucer mania. Although skyhook balloons, singly or in clusters, may account for most of the reliable reports, one must not forget that many other types of balloons are riding the skies. Weather balloons often carry steady or blinking lights and various shaped metal gadgets. Radar-target balloons trail large targets of aluminum foil. Guided missiles, and experimental aircraft of unusual design, may also account for some of the saucer sightings.
In addition, one must consider a score of possible illusions arising from faulty observations of planes, flying birds, the planet Venus, reflections of lights on clouds, and similar phenomena. The theory that the disks are mirages produced by unusual weather conditions has been advanced by Donald H. Menzel, a Harvard professor of astrophysics, and will be defended by him in a forthcoming book, The Truth About Flying Saucers. Normally such illusions would be rare, but under the pressure of mild mass hysteria, they greatly increase in number and, of course, are more likely to be reported. Even delusions without external cause can be induced in the minds of neurotics if there is a strong public belief with which the delusions may be identified.
Lastly, there are the lies and semi-lies. A book could be written about flying saucer hoaxes perpetrated in the past few years by pranksters, publicity seekers, and psychotics. Unfortunately, exposure of the hoax seldom catches up with the original story.
Even more difficult to expose are the semi-lies—accounts which have a basis in fact, but may be grossly exaggerated. For example, an observer sees a balloon but is convinced it is a saucer. Others are skeptical and this irritates him. So to convince them, he adds, details, or exaggerates what he has seen. He may do this without being aware of it, and later recall the episode not as he saw it, but as he has added to it in his desire to convince himself and others. This is a well-known human failing and there is no reason to suppose it could not be involved in hundreds of so-called saucer sightings.
It is possible, of course, there may be some type of experimental aircraft resembling a disk and flying without sound that is still officially top-secret. But this seems extremely unlikely. Information now available on the cosmic ray balloons, together with the factors mentioned above, are sufficient to account for all that has happened. Official denials by the military and by the President have the earmarks of authenticity. Naturally, it will always be impossible to prove there never was a flying saucer. Believers in the elusive platters are likely to be around for decades. But there is every reason now to expect that the saucer mania will go down in history as merely one more example of a mass delusion.
At this point, the reader may well ask, “What has all this to do with pseudo-science?” The answer is: very little if it were not for the fact that a widespread belief has developed that flying saucers are not only real, but are spaceships from another world. This view has been exploited in numerous magazine articles and three hardcover books published by reputable presses.
The first magazine to promote the extra-planetary theory was Fate, a pocket-size pulp specializing in articles on telepathy, spiritualism, and other occult subjects. The publisher is Raymond Palmer who formerly edited a science-fiction magazine called Amazing Stories. It was as editor of this magazine that Palmer was responsible for the greatest of all science-fiction hoaxes. It is known as the Great Shaver Mystery,1 and involves a series of stories which first appeared in Palmer’s magazine in 1945. The tales were Palmer’s expansions of briefer drafts by a Pennsylvania welder named Richard Shaver. Drawing on his “racial memories,” Shaver described in great detail the activities of a midget race of degenerates called “deros” who live in huge caverns beneath the surface of the earth. By means of telepathy and secret rays, the deros are responsible for most of earth’s catastrophes—wars, fires, airplane crashes, shipwrecks, and nervous breakdowns. What happened to Judge Crater? He was kidnapped by the deros! The monsters even stole copy from Palmer’s desk!
Shaver’s stories were presented as solid fact, and so convincingly that thousands of naive readers were, and perhaps still are, taken in by them. More adult science fiction fans, who objected to Palmer’s ethics in running this series, finally kicked up such a protest that the publisher of Amazing ordered the stories killed. Shaver’s latest work, distributed by Palmer, hangs the saucers on a race of Titans (the original masters of the deros) who fled into outer space two hundred centuries ago and are now returning.
It is not, therefore, to Arnold’s credit that his first article on flying saucers—titled “I Did See the Flying Disks”—appeared in the first issue of Fate, Spring, 1948. In addition, Palmer recently announced a privately printed book on the saucers, soon to be on sale for five dollars, which he has written in collaboration with Arnold.
Arnold has contributed several other pieces to Fate. His “Phantom Lights in Nevada” (Fall, 1948) is about strange disks of pale red or yellow light seen hugging the ground at night in the Oregon Canyon Ranch, near McDermott, Nevada. “More than fifty of the shepherds of the area have seen the mysterious lights,” he wrote, “and it has been noted that dogs bark at them, proving they are visible to animals as well as humans.” Another article by Arnold, “Are Space Visitors Here?” (Summer, 1948), describes globes of a blue-green-purple color. They were seen by a fisherman in Ontario, and Arnold suspects they are spacecraft from another planet. His latest piece, “The Real Flying Saucer,” appeared in the January 1952 issue of Other Worlds—arother Palmer magazine.
Arnold himself published, and sells for fifty cents, a pamphlet of fifteen pages titled The Flying Saucer as I Saw It. This pamphlet, like the saucer, must be seen to be believed. The Maury Island hoax is taken seriously and there is even a drawing of the giant doughnut belching forth lava rock. Arnold reveals that a Tacoma reporter who wrote about the episode died suddenly of unknown causes (presumably killed by saucer men). A plane crash on Mt. Rainier, in which thirty-two Marines perished, is likewise linked to the disks on the ground that the crash occurred shortly before Arnold’s first saucer sighting. Furthermore, in 1947 a suspension bridge near Riggins, Idaho, was mysteriously ignited by “something” of such intense heat that the steel cables burned like wood!
Arnold accepts the report that one saucer, chased by a pilot, made evasive maneuvers in response to the pilot’s thoughts. Two pages are devoted to pictures of “radar angels”—white splotches of light which sometimes appear on radar screens, though what connection they have with saucers is not made clear. There is a photograph of a mummified man fourteen inches tall, discovered in 1932 in the Rockies and now owned by a man in Caspar, Wyoming. Arnold thinks this lends credence to reports that tiny men have been found in saucers that have crashed (Fate, Sept., 1950, ran an article by Ray Palmer on this mummy). He also thinks there is some sinister connection between the saucers and mystery submarines reported off the coasts.
A press clipping is reproduced in which Arnold says to a reporter, “I realize it’s the ‘data of the damned’ to make a report on these things. . . . Who’s to determine what is and what isn’t a fact?” The quoted phrase is, of course, Fort’s. Arnold prints a number of Fort’s “data” on mysterious sky objects, and adds that he himself has a collection of many similar reports.2
The second magazine to publicize the spaceship theory was True. In its January 1950 issue, an article by Donald Keyhoe opened as follows:
After eight months of intensive investigation, the following conclusions have been reached by True magazine:
1. For the past 175 years, the planet Earth has been under systematic close-range examination by living intelligent observers from another planet.
2. The intensity of this observation, and the frequency of the visits . . . have increased markedly during the past two years.
Two months later, True ran another piece on saucers. Written by Commander Robert B. McLaughlin, on active duty in the Navy, the article developed the theory that the platters were piloted by Martians small enough to fit into twenty-inch disks. “It is staggering to imagine intelligent beings that small,” McLaughlin confessed, “but we must not disregard any possibilities.” The Commander speculated at some length on the craft’s mode of propulsion, coming to the conclusion that it probably has three sets of motors, using light radiation (from an atomic source) as pressure “against a heavily shielded curved reflector.”
The most recent article arguing the extra-planetary theory appeared in Life, April 7, 1952, at a time when other magazines and newspapers had almost relegated the disks to limbo. This article may have been a major cause of the revival of saucer reports in the months which followed. Einstein was prompted by the revival to issue the statement that he had no curiosity about the saucers, and Father Francis J. Connell, dean of Catholic University’s School of Sacred Theology, pointed out that Catholic belief does not exclude the possibility of intelligent life on other planets. “If these supposed rational beings should possess the immortality of body once enjoyed by Adam and Eve,” Father Connell said, “it would be foolish for our superjet or rocket pilots to try to shoot them. They would be unkillable.”3
Donald Keyhoe’s book, The Flying Saucers Are Real, was issued in 1950 by Fawcett Publications, publishers of True. It gives the impression of a sincere, though scientifically naive, effort by a journalist and former Marine pilot to round up all the information he can on the topic. He tells the story of his research chronologically, almost like a work of fiction. As it progresses, you see the author’s growing suspicion that military officials are not playing square with him. Gradually, he comes to the conclusion that the Air Force’s “Project Saucer” was set up not only to investigate, but also to conceal—to conceal from the public the fact that the saucers are from another planet.
“As I waited for a taxi,” he writes, “I looked up at the sky. It was a clear summer night, without a single cloud. Beyond the low hill to the west I could see the stars. I can still remember thinking. If it’s true, then the stars will never again seem the same.”
Keyhoe is convinced that the earth has been under periodic observation by another planet, or planets, for at least two centuries. He thinks this observation increased in 1947 as a result of our series of atom bomb explosions which aroused the curiosity of the space men. Their visits are “part of a long range survey, and will continue indefinitely. No immediate attempt to contact the earth seems evident. There may be some unknown block to making contact, but it is more probable that the space men’s plans are not complete.”
Keyhoe believes that Mantell was not only chasing a space ship, but that the space men—by some unknown power—killed Mantell before he could reach them. In an earlier chapter, he writes, “The secret of the spaceship’s power is more important than even the hydrogen bomb. It may someday be the key to the fate of the world.”
Romantic and preposterous as these speculations certainly are, they seem like the remarks of a cautious scientist when compared to the second of the three books which have been written about the topic. Frank Scully’s Behind the Flying Saucers, published in 1951 by Henry Holt, is filled with so many scientific howlers, and such wild imaginings that when True magazine, Sept., 1952, revealed it to be a hoax, there was little cause for surprise. Scully is the Hollywood columnist for Variety. His previous book, Fun in Bed, suggests his status as a scientist and thinker.4
The major theme of Scully’s book is that the saucers are flown here by “magnetic propulsion” (whatever that is) from Venus. They travel with the speed of light (or faster) and are piloted by Venusians who are exact duplicates of earthlings except they are three feet high and have teeth completely free of cavities. A mysterious “magnetic specialist” whom he calls “Dr. Gee” is Scully’s chief source of information.5 Four saucers have landed. Three crashed, but the fourth took off again. The crashed ships, including several dozen Venusian bodies, are now being studied at undisclosed government laboratories.
According to Scully, the saucers are made of a hard but extremely light metal completely unknown to our chemists. All the dimensions of the ships are divisible by nine. Their cabins revolve on an unfamiliar gear ratio. One ship “defied all efforts to get inside of it, despite the use of $35,000 worth of diamond drills.” The Venusians carried “heavy water” for drinking, and concentrated food wafers. A tiny radio operated on unknown principles. Booklets were found written in pictorial script which our experts are now trying to decipher.
All this is thoroughly mixed with a continual sniping at the Truman administration for its “hush-hush policy” on the saucers, its bungling bureaucracy, and its cowardly failure to take the people into confidence. Debunkers of the saucers are charged with following “Party lines.”
The third and most recent book on the topic—Gerald Heard’s Is Another World Watching?, Harper’s, 1951—is the most terrifying of the three. Terrifying because there is the very real possibility that Heard (a sincere and devout mystic) actually believes everything he writes. He is the author of many learned, scholarly works in the fields of religion, psychology, and anthropology, as well as a number of mystery novels. As might be expected, he writes with considerably more polish than either Keyhoe or Scully, quoting occasionally from Shakespeare and John Stuart Mill, and making a great pother about fairness in all his reasoning.
Heard thinks the saucers come from Mars. Considering their small size, plus the speed with which they maneuver, he concludes that only an insect would be tiny enough, and have a hide sufficiently tough, to withstand the crushing inertial effect of sudden turns. These and other lines of thought convince him that the ships are piloted by Martian “super-bees” about two inches long and possessing an intelligence much higher than man’s. Here is Heard’s description of what these bees may look like:
A creature with eyes like brilliant cut diamonds, with a head of sapphire, a thorax of emerald, an abdomen of ruby, wings like opal, legs like topaz—such a body would be worthy of this super-mind. I am sure that toward it our reaction would be: “What a diadem of living jewels!” It is we would feel shabby and ashamed and maybe, with our clammy, putty-colored bodies, repulsive!
Of course . . . we must allow that we should find it hard to make friends with anything that had more than two legs. . . .
Like Keyhoe, Heard believes the space men are here as scouts to investigate atomic explosions. Our sun is a Cepheid, or pulsing star, Heard states (which of course it isn’t), and might possibly explode if our atomic blasts destroy its delicate chemical balance. Already our atom bombs have increased the size of spots on the sun, and sunspots “may be warnings of indigestive troubles—as spots on our own face sometimes tell about our deep interior conflicts. . . . Is it not possible that the Martians, who have so much to fear from sun trouble, may have read these signs?”
The Martian scouts, Heard believes, are seeking information about us but are careful to avoid direct contacts. A huge “mother ship” has been established as an earth satellite. From this ship the smaller, saucer-like craft go “ashore” to do the scouting. Mars’ two satellites, he suspects, are not natural moons at all. They are artificial launching jetties for Martian spaceships!
A half dozen photographs of saucers are reproduced in the front of the book. The only two pictures clear enough to show anything were taken by Paul Trent, a farmer in McMinville, Oregon. They were printed in Life’s June 26, 1950 issue. Trent’s saucer bears a striking resemblance to the top of a garbage can tossed into the air.
Both Heard and Keyhoe take for granted that science has established the high probability of intelligent life on Mars. Actually, this is not the case. The fact is there is no evidence one way or the other. At the most, some obscure color changes on the planet may be interpreted as vegetation varying with the seasons. The so-called canals of Mars have had a highly dubious history. They were first reported in 1877 by an Italian astronomer, and later defended by the American astronomer, Percival Lowell. Unfortunately, later observers, with much better telescopes and great visual acuity, have been unable to see them. The consensus among modern astronomers is that the “canals” were subjective interpretations with no reality outside the minds of Lowell and others who fancied they could see them.6
The quickness with which the public will accept evidence of life on nearby worlds is astonishing. One of the best examples was the famous Moon Hoax perpetrated by the New York Sun in 1835. This was a series of articles reporting what the great British astronomer Sir John Herschel had seen through a new telescope at Cape Town, Africa. The articles described life on the moon, with accompanying drawings of apelike creatures who “averaged four feet in height, were covered, except on the face, with short and glossy copper-colored hair, and had wings composed of thin membranes. . . . Our further observation of the habits of these creatures, who were of both sexes, led to results so very remarkable, that I prefer they should first be laid before the public in Dr. Herschel’s own work . . . they are doubtless innocent and happy creatures, notwithstanding some of their amusements would but ill comport with our terrestrial notions of decorum.”
The hoax was intended as a satire, but it was accepted as fact by about half of New York City, and many believers remained unconvinced even after the reporter, Richard Locke, publicly admitted the deception!
A somewhat similar, but more upsetting, prank was played on the American public the night of Halloween, 1938, when Orson Welles presented a radio version of H. G. Wells’ War of the Worlds. The broadcast opened with dance music, which was then interrupted by a series of news flashes. The first flash reported a gas explosion on Mars. The second, an earthquake tremor in New Jersey. Finally, there was a spot broadcast from Grovers Mill, New Jersey, describing a huge, cylindrical spaceship out of which came bug-eyed monsters armed with death rays. Other cylinders land and the monsters manage to destroy most of New York before they die of disease germs for which they had no resistance.
Six million people heard the broadcast, and it is estimated that approximately one million took it seriously enough to be in some degree frightened. Thousands wept, prayed, closed their windows to shut out poison gas, or fled from their homes expecting the world to end. Phone lines were tied up for hours. The panic was from coast to coast, but the greatest hysteria was in the southern states among the poorly educated. If the Moon Hoax could be believed in 1835, and an invasion from Mars taken seriously in 1938, perhaps it is not so hard to understand a widespread acceptance of the spaceship theory of flying saucers in a decade that has split the atom and bounced radar off the moon.
Charles Fort, in one of his books, devotes a chapter to observations of cigar-shaped objects in the skies. He concludes: “Some of the accounts are not very detailed, but out of the bits of description my own acceptance is that super-geographical routes are traversed by torpedo-shaped super-constructions that have occasionally visited, or that have occasionally been driven into this earth’s atmosphere.”
Many of the strange sky objects discussed by Fort were in the shape of saucers, though of course Fort did not use that term. For example—a gray disk observed in 1870 by a sea captain; or the dark, circular object “with a structure of some kind upon the side of it, travelling at a great pace.” The latter was observed one moonlit night in 1908 by employees of the Norwich Transportation Company, at Mousehead, England. “It seemed too large for a kite,” they said, “and, besides, its movements seemed under control for it was travelling against the wind.”
Fort had many explanations for these sightings. “Perhaps,” he wrote, “there are inhabitants of Mars, who are secretly sending reports upon the ways of this world to their governments.” On another page he speculated, “. . . I conceive of other worlds and vast structures that pass us by, within a few miles, without the slightest desire to communicate quite as tramp vessels pass many islands. . . .”
Fort’s most daring hypothesis was that humanity was owned—owned by higher intelligences who visited earth occasionally to check on their charges. “. . . something now has a legal right to us, by force, or by having paid out analogues of beads for us to former, more primitive, owners . . . that all this had been known, perhaps for ages, to certain ones upon this earth, a cult or order, members of which function like bellwethers to the rest of us, or as superior slaves or overseers, directing us in accordance with instructions received—from Somewhere else. . . .”
“I think we’re property,” wrote Fort. This casual sentence inspired one of the best-known science fiction novels of recent years—Sinister Barrier, by Eric Frank Russell. Russell is chief British correspondent for the Fortean Society, and a half-believer in many of Fort’s speculations.
The Society, incidentally, was not impressed at all by the flying saucer mania. In 1947 Thayer devoted issue No. 19 of Doubt to the saucers, but after that reported on them reluctantly. “Forteans have a legitimate gripe,” he wrote, “at the usurpation of our long-time franchise upon lights and objects in the sky by the military and its lackey freeprez [free press].”
One suspects, however, that if Fort had lived until the flying-saucer era he would have thoroughly enjoyed reading the flood of Fortean speculations about the celestial platters. And how he would have chuckled at the frantic efforts of the military to persuade a dazed public that nothing sinister or extraordinary was taking place above their heads!